The Clintons' House on Clinton Drive

In the fall of nineteen seventy-three, a twenty-seven-year-old Yale Law School graduate named Bill Clinton arrived at the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville to take a teaching job. He taught constitutional law. The following year, a woman named Hillary Rodham came down from Washington, where she had been working on the House Judiciary Committee's impeachment inquiry, to visit him.

The law school faculty was so impressed with her that they offered her a position on the spot. She took it and taught criminal law. On August eleventh, nineteen seventy-five, Clinton paid seventeen thousand two hundred dollars for a small brick house on what is now Clinton Drive, just south of the campus.

On October eleventh, nineteen seventy-five, Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were married in the living room of that house. He was twenty-nine. She was twenty-seven.

A handful of friends attended. Hillary Rodham made sixteen thousand four hundred fifty dollars a year teaching. Bill Clinton made sixteen thousand one hundred eighty-two.

Together they were two junior assistant professors at a state law school in a small Arkansas university town, each making roughly what a starting schoolteacher earned anywhere else in the country. Clinton ran for Arkansas attorney general in nineteen seventy-six and won. The Fayetteville chapter closed, but it had produced something durable.

Two of the most consequential careers in late-twentieth-century American politics began their arc in that brick house, over those two years, in those modest salaries, in a university town in the Ozarks. The house is now a museum, open to the public.